Resurrecting Bush II’s “extraordinary rendition”
Slate reports that details are now emerging about the “evidence” the Trump administration used to round up and incarcerate 250 Venezuelans in a notorious Salvadoran supermax prison.
Trump 2.0’s PR strategy behind this roundup is to claim — without providing evidence or even deportees names — that each and every one is a violent terrorist present on U.S. soil illegally, trust us. And then dare human rights activists to defend not deporting the supposed threats to Americans’ safety. Except it’s the extrajudicial deportation of #Donalds_Desaparecidos that’s at issue.
Trump 2.0 has taken an illegal page from the Bush II administration’s “extraordinary rendition” campaign 20 years ago. As a result of a “a paper-thin evidential chain,” Canadian engineer, Maher Arar, endured 10 months of beatings in Syria after being detained while changing planes at JFK airport. He was later released without charge. Another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, named Arar after enduring two years of torture in Syria over allegations of al-Qaida connections. According to the Guardian newspaper, El Maati eventually “reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal,” including Arar. (I wrote an op-ed on this at the time.)
Trump 2.0 claims that the Venezuelans it rendered to El Salvador “are terrorists by virtue of their alleged membership in the Tren de Aragua gang,” but as with the kidnapping the U.S. did during Bush’s “global war on terror” (GWOT), “evidence of this affiliation is weak to the point of nonexistence.”
Slate provides examples:
Consider Jerce Reyes Barrios, one victim of the deportations: a professional soccer player who had fled Venezuela after protesting against dictator Nicolás Maduro and was living peacefully in the U.S. until the government snatched him up and deported him to El Salvador. Linette Tobin, Barrios’ attorney, submitted a declaration in federal court that detailed the disturbing reasons why her client was targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After entering the U.S. last year, Barrios was scheduled to have an asylum hearing in April. But on Saturday, he was arrested and held at a San Diego detention facility after ICE agents accused him of being a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang that President Donald Trump has been fixated on to fulfill his mass-deportation plan.
ICE’s accusations were based on two things. First, Barrios has a tattoo on his arm of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball that, federal immigration authorities allege, “is proof of gang membership.” In reality, Tobin wrote, the tattoo was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer team, which is also circular in shape and features a crown. Second, Barrios posted a photo of himself on social media in which he’s gesturing with both hands, with his middle fingers down. This, federal agents claimed, was also proof of gang membership—except that Barrios’ hand gesture actually means “I love you” in sign language and is also commonly used as a symbol of rock ’n’ roll.
In the second episode of Netflix’s “Adolescence,” the son of an English detective investigating a girl’s murder pulls him aside to warn him that his embarrassing misreading of emojis in social media posts has him completely misunderstanding the case he’s building. Dad simply has no clue how online youth code works. Neither do ICE’s flunkies regarding tattoos. Nor are they inclined to care. Not when the boss’ mandate is deport ’em all, let El Salvador sort ’em out.
Trump 2.0 has adopted strategies for avoiding judicial review of its disappearing any non-citizens it deems undesirable. They will get to you soon enough.
Slate ponders what’s changed:
It’s an open question whether ICE targeted these men because of their tattoos or whether agents detained them first, then fabricated a pretext later. Those details will hopefully be sorted out when lawyers for the victims can interrogate those who perpetrated this scheme. What matters most now is that judges have an opportunity to review the alleged evidence, in conjunction with the relevant law, and end this persecution before its test run is expanded into a full-blown suspension of all immigrants’ constitutional rights.
And yours.
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